Students from Carnegie Mellon and four historically black universities teamed up to take first place and win a special acknowledgment in the IJCAI 2009 Student Robotics Challenge. The students used the Chiara hexapod robot designed in CMU's Tekkotsu lab (see Chiara-Robot.org).

The team consisted of:

Ethan Tira-Thompson (CMU Robotics PhD student), Alex Grubb (CMU CS PhD student), and four undergraduates: Owen Watson (Florida A&M University), Samantha Beal (North Carolina A&T University), Julian Strothers (Hampton University), and Charlston Manning (Morehouse College).

The team was advised by Professor David Touretzky, head of the Tekkotsu Lab. All four undergraduates are interning in the lab this summer. An affiliated entry from Florida A&M University, submitted by graduate student Sherene Campbell with her advisor, Professor Clement Allen, also used the Chiara robot, and received a judges' award for contributions to an emerging architecture.

The joint work on the robotics challenge reflects CMU's prominent role in the ARTSI Alliance, an NSF-funded consortium of 13 historically black colleges and universities and 10 major research universities that works to attract African American students to careers in computer science and robotics research. The Alliance is headed by Professor Andrew Williams of Spelman College. Touretzky serves as the lead co-PI and Director of Robotics Education.

The Chiara is a new platform designed for teaching undergraduates the computer science side of robotics. It uses the Tekkotsu open-source software framework developed at Carnegie Mellon. Several schools in the ARTSI Alliance have received Chiara robots funded by a gift from Seagate Research. Additional funding for ARTSI activities has come from grants from the Motorola Foundation, Google, Intel, Boeing, Apple, and iRobot.